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Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia also has an article on Hitler's paintings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paintings_by_Adolf_Hitler

Even the better ones still look odd, like kitschy comics. For lack of a better description, his paintings completely lack any kind of poetic depth.

edit: the article actually contains a better description by John Gunther:

"They are prosaic, utterly devoid of rhythm, color, feeling, or spiritual imagination. They are architect's sketches painful and precise draftsmanship; nothing more. No wonder the Vienna professors told him to go to an architectural school and give up pure art as hopeless"

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"One modern art critic was asked to review some of his paintings without being told who painted them and judged them quite good in 2002. The different style in which he drew human figures, however, the critic said, represented a profound disinterest in people."

But of course he was a Bad Man, so he cannot be allowed to have any good qualities, therefore his art is bad.

A lot of context is missing from that quote. I'm pretty sure nobody sane have ever claimed this is great art. But perhaps quite good for an amateur. Only the buildings really works in the paintings, the rest looks like crap.

But he seem to be quite competent at drawing architecture, which is also what the Vienna school told him.

> I'm pretty sure nobody sane have ever claimed this is great art.

You would think the same was true of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Darks_in_Red, and yet...

Have you seen the Rothko in person? It is a large work with deep color that doesn’t reproduce in photos displayed on computer screens.

Unfortunately, the only Rothko I've seen in person was a small one. But I have seen a lot of other modern art in person, large and small. I was not impressed.

When you bring up contemporary critique of Hitler's paintings it's worth noting that Hitler's ill-fated aspirations as a painter came in a time and place where art was moving in leaps and bounds towards much more abstract styles. I'm not an expert in this area, so I can't really qualify exactly what you'd call the fashion of the time, but it certainly wasn't the classicism that Hitler's paintings represented. For an amateur painter, I think most people agree he had some talent, but he'd have a hard time getting accepted by a much more avant-garde art establishment.

I don't think that is the case. Hitler was rejected from the entrance exam to the Vienna academy in 1905. At that point the academy was notoriously conservative (which is what led to the "secession" movement). It certainly did not represent the avant-garde in the modern sense.

The tendency the "art establishment" prefer abstract, avant-garde art is much more recent. Probably in part spurred by Nazisms campaign against "entartete Kunst"!

Interesting! Maybe I've been misinformed. I might have my timeline a bit confused, I had always thought this was the case.

I think is is just a more compelling narrative that Hitler was rejected because he didn't make crazy incomprehensible "my 5-year old son could have made that!" avant-garde art. But note that cubism was barely invented in 1907, and the academy represented a conservative view of art. If you look at the kind of art Hitler endorsed when he came to power, it was actually pretty close to the academy style.

That is a compelling narrative I guess. I had always associated that period of Viennese art with that of Gustav Klimt, who seems to have been reasonably successful in that period. He probably didn't represent the conservative views of the academy as you said.

No Klimt represented the "Secession" movement which at that time was in opposition to the establishment and the academy. According to wikipedia: "in particular, opposing the domination of the official Vienna Academy of the Arts, the Vienna Künstlerhaus, and official art salons, with its traditional orientation toward Historicism. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Secession

I think Nazims famous opposition to modern art have been conflated with Hitlers own rejection from the academy. He wasn't rejected due due different genre preference, but because he wasn't good enough in drawing anything beside architecture.

I actually think some of his paintings and sketches look quite good for a young artist, who hadn't even received proper training yet. There are some more available on Wikimedia Commons:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings_by_Ado...

They really aren’t that bad. Very uneven, but that’s to be expected from a young person. The few looser paintings like “Klosterruine in Messines” show promise IMHO, at least compared to the heavy-handed drafting of most of the watercolors.

This one makes me think that it would be an amazing trolling opportunity to remove the signature, create high-quality reproductions of this “Mary with Jesus” and give them out to American Evangelicals, as the art style generally matches the Christian fundamentalist taste: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HitlerMaryWithJesu...

As I commented above. many of his works were far from hopeless for a young artist, and if he'd been accepted to the right academy, the latent talent could have nurtured something much better, but the safe thing even for modern art critics is to simply agree with a prevailing and hindsight biased idea that of course the art showed a total lack of imagination and humanity and was right for rejection. One wonders at the world we'd know today if the young Hitler had gotten an admissions official with just a bit more imagination for his application.

Now that is interesting.

I have zero artistic talent and the only art I know is what I learned from an art appreciation class in highschool and and art history class in college. With that being said, those paintings look pretty similar to the kind of stuff I see in museums or in people's homes. I was expecting to see crude stick figures based off of the descriptions.

You are not going to see anything like that in an art museum. But in peoples homes, sure. This is the kind of art street-artists sell to tourists.

It is easy to see why they recommended him architecture instead though. The buildings are drawn technically good and precise, but they are also the only thing that really works. Nature and people looks pretty bad. But of course with appropriate training he might have learned that also, who knows.

Tiresome and rather stupid hindsight bias. I even generally agree with the opinion in your quote about Hitler's art, but in the broad scope of works that have been heavily applauded by art critics and galleries, it falls far from bottom rung. And it's certainly not deserving of someone declaring its creator's efforts as "hopeless". That would just be a shitty attitude because an artist with the technical proficiency of Hitler could indeed be successfully nurtured in the right environment towards really creating something interesting. But of course, because it's Hitler, safer to say it was prosaic crap with no humanity to it and no hope of anything better had things been different...

They aren’t that bad for an aspiring amateur. Imagine a world where he had got the instruction he knew he needed and unleashed his energy and passion as Adolf Hitler, Artist instead of Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler

In Norman Spinrad's book The Iron Dream a young Hitler moved to New York City and became an illustrator for pulp science fiction magazines.

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